Why Imgur's Business Model is so successful?

Imgur, Inc. operates an online platform that offers image hosting and sharing services. The users can share photos with social networks and online communities.

Social impact:

Life changing: affiliation/belonging, self-actualization

Emotional: fun/entertainment, provides access, badge value

Functional: integrates, simplifies, organizes, variety

Advertising:

This approach generated money by sending promotional marketing messages from other businesses to customers. When you establish a for-profit company, one of the most critical aspects of your strategy is determining how to generate income. Many companies sell either products or services or a mix of the two. However, advertisers are frequently the source of the majority of all of the revenue for online businesses and media organizations. This is referred to as an ad-based income model.

Benchmarking services:

Benchmarking is a technique for evaluating performance and gaining insights via data analytics. It may be used to conduct internal research on your firm or compare it to other businesses to enhance business processes and performance indicators following best practices. Typically, three dimensions are measured: quality, time, and cost. In this manner, they may ascertain the targets' performance and, more significantly, the business processes that contribute to these companies' success. The digital transformation era has spawned a slew of data analysis-focused software businesses.

Beyond advertising:

Media and print businesses will excel at enabling people and groups' sharing, contribution, and interaction. All contact will be conducted electronically, and impartial review sites will assist media and print businesses develop trusted consumer connections. Their cost structure will fundamentally change, shifting away from paper and distribution, content management, and internet facilitation. Instead, revenues will be produced via facilitation fees paid by commercial and public partners and commissions paid to sellers of products and services.

Community-funded:

The critical resource in this business strategy is a community's intellect. Three distinct consumer groups comprise this multifaceted business model: believers, suppliers, and purchasers. First, believers join the online community platform and contribute to the production of goods by vendors. Second, buyers purchase these goods, which may be visual, aural, or literary in nature. Finally, believers may be purchasers or providers, and vice versa.

Digitization:

This pattern is based on the capacity to convert current goods or services into digital versions, which have several benefits over intangible products, including increased accessibility and speed of distribution. In an ideal world, the digitalization of a product or service would occur without compromising the consumer value proposition. In other words, efficiency and multiplication achieved via digitalization do not detract from the consumer's perceived value. Being digitally sustainable encompasses all aspects of sustaining the institutional framework for developing and maintaining digital objects and resources and ensuring their long-term survival.

Exposure:

This model collects data and connects it to others; it is suggested to investigate the impact of advertising on consumer purchase dynamics by explicitly linking the distribution of exposures from a brand's media schedule to the brand purchase incidence behavior patterns over time. The danger is that we may be unable to react productively and cost-effectively to technological and market changes.

Lean Start-up:

The Lean Start-up methodology is a scientific approach to developing and managing businesses that focuses on getting the desired product into consumers' hands as quickly as possible. The Lean Startup method coaches you on how to guide a startup?when to turn, when to persevere?and how to build a company with maximum acceleration. It is a guiding philosophy for new product development.

Long tail:

The long tail is a strategy that allows businesses to realize significant profit out of selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The term was coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, who argued that products in low demand or with low sales volume can collectively make up market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

Micro-segmentation:

Micro-segmentation is a more sophisticated type of segmentation in which a small number of consumers are classified into very accurate categories based on various variables, including behavioral forecasts. Customer micro-segmentation is the process of segmenting a firm's customers into groups based on their relationship with that business. The purpose of segmenting customers is to determine how to relate to each segment's customers to optimize each customer's value to the company.

Mobile first behavior:

It is intended to mean that as a company thinks about its website or its other digital means of communications, it should be thinking critically about the mobile experience and how customers and employees will interact with it from their many devices. The term is “mobile first,” and it is intended to mean that as a company thinks about its website or its other digital means of communications, it should be thinking critically about the mobile experience and how customers and employees will interact with it from their many devices.

Pay as you go:

Pay as you go (PAYG) business models charge based on actual consumption or use of a product or service. Specific mobile phone contracts work on this principle, in which the user may purchase a phone card that provides credit. However, each call is billed separately, and the credit balance is depleted as the minutes are used (in contrast to subscription models where you pay a monthly fee for calls). Pay as you go is another term for pay & go, pay per use, pay per use, or pay-as-you-go.

Reputation builders:

Reputation builders is an innovative software platform that enables companies to create, collect, and manage positive internet reviews. It was a pioneer in the utilization of user-generated material. The website services are provided for free to users, who supply the majority of the content, and the websites of related businesses are monetized via advertising.

Self-service:

A retail business model in which consumers self-serve the goods they want to buy. Self-service business concepts include self-service food buffets, self-service petrol stations, and self-service markets. Self-service is available through phone, online, and email to automate customer support interactions. Self-service Software and self-service applications (for example, online banking apps, shopping portals, and self-service check-in at airports) are becoming more prevalent.

Selling of branded merchandise:

Merchandising, in the broadest definition, is any activity that helps sell goods to a retail customer. At the retail in-store level, merchandising refers to the range of goods offered for sale and the presentation of those products in a manner that piques consumers' attention and encourages them to make a purchase. Like the Mozilla Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation, specific open-source organizations offer branded goods such as t-shirts and coffee mugs. This may also be seen as an added service to the user community.

Tag management:

Tag management refers to the capability of the collaborative software to handle both your own and user-generated tags. Marketers use various third-party solutions to enhance their websites, video content, and mobile applications. Web analytics, campaign analytics, audience measurement, customization, A/B testing, ad servers, retargeting, and conversion tracking are examples of such systems. At its most fundamental level, tag management enables new methods for your business model to use data.

Two-sided market:

Two-sided marketplaces, also called two-sided networks, are commercial platforms featuring two different user groups that mutually profit from the web. A multi-sided platform is an organization that generates value mainly via the facilitation of direct contacts between two (or more) distinct kinds of connected consumers (MSP). A two-sided market enables interactions between many interdependent consumer groups. The platform's value grows as more groups or individual members of each group use it. For example, eBay is a marketplace that links buyers and sellers. Google connects advertising and searchers. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are also bidirectional, linking consumers and marketers.

Unlimited niches:

Online retailers provide specialized content to various niche client groups via continuing mass-customized customer relationships. The sector of technical content providers is a second client segment. Combining these two factors may result in an infinite number of niches. New material is produced and distributed through online channels, which implies that online retailers must prioritize platform maintenance and marketing in addition to service delivery.

User design:

A client is both the manufacturer and the consumer in user manufacturing. For instance, an online platform could offer the client the tools required to create and market the product, such as product design software, manufacturing services, or an online store to sell the goods. In addition, numerous software solutions enable users to create and customize their products to respond to changing consumer requirements seamlessly.